Books Seeds of Story The Omnipotent Eye Versus the Neighborhood: James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State On the tricky science of improving (or failing to improve) the human condition… By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on January 27, 2026 Comment 4 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. It’s about what we lose when we try to make things measurable, regulatable, and optimizable—and why we try to do those things in the first place. It’s probably fair to call this book a foundational text for 21st-century social science fiction; it’s also full of ideas for making social scientists very nervous. What It’s About The history of the state is, in part, a centuries-long quest to be able to see—and therefore control—the activities that take place in their domains. Taxation, law, regulation, provision of services, maintenance and repair, can only happen where the state can measure and understand the resources to be taxed, the activities to be forbidden or required, the needs to be met, and the status of that water main. Scott calls this legibility. While the initial motivations were for the benefit of rulers, modern states also provide value to citizens—or at least, I personally like regular garbage pickup and sewage treatment. However, the quest for legibility comes with serious tradeoffs. Measurement requires quantification and simplification of systems that are, in many cases, healthier in their natural complex forms. It also requires glossing over the reality of complexity that can’t be reduced. This tradeoff was particularly unclear to 20th-century high modernists, drunk on the low-hanging fruit of early 20th-century technocratic organization. New forms of power generation were (and still are) resisted by industrialists profiting off the old; medical advances were (and still are) resisted by popular prejudices and purveyors of snake oil. High modernist overreach quickly led to failures, but was slow to acknowledge them. Le Corbusier demanded well-organized cities. He created the first building standards, but was also convinced that modern, legible communities required absolute separation of functions—pedestrian versus motorized travel, work versus home, all the foundations of modern zoning woes. If your neighborhood isn’t walkable, or your downtown is a desert of parking garages, you can probably blame him. “Many new capitals,” Scott says of Corbusier-planned cities, “seem intended as completed and self-contained objects. No subtraction, addition, or modification is contemplated—only admiration.” Imagine the Jetsons’ towers, and ask yourself what life would be like if flying cars were the only way to leave your house. High modernism gets worse the less room there is for pushback from those who have to live with it. Lenin argued for authoritarian imposition of organization and legibility, which he put into practice as soon as he could. Forced collectivization in the Soviet Union, and similar pushes for easily countable and measurable production (e.g., forced permanent settlement in Tanzania in the ’70s) all aim for standardization at the cost of long-term sustainability and resilience. This kind of centralization is the foundation for any sort of extractive imperialism or authoritarianism; it makes it easier to take resources from those who need them, but also reduces local ability to produce resources tailored to local needs. Long-term, this push for legibility leads to many of the environmental problems we face now. Scott describes how “the systematic, cyclopean shortsightedness of high-modernist agriculture that courts certain forms of failure… casts into relative obscurity all the outcomes lying outside the immediate relationship between farm inputs and yields.” Soil structure, water quality, land-tenure relations—all the things that Kimmerer celebrates about a working ecology are undermined by neat monocropped rows. The rows are easy to count, predict, and harvest with modern machinery. They also demand making all the land’s topography and geography as close to identical as possible, and lose all the advantages of a diverse, thriving ecosystem. It’s not only land and buildings that get simplified in the quest for legibility, but people. So many skills—farming, firefighting, medicine, artistic creation—require the “metis” practical knowledge that involves constant adaptation to situational variability. High modernism values transferability of skills over dependence on individual expertise (except where the expert serves the modernist organizational effort). Standardization allows for scaling and automation, and predictable factory outputs. It also reduces not only the advantages of metis, but recognition and appreciation of that kind of positive variability. Ultimately, what Scott recommends is humility. There are advantages of legibility that most of us would prefer not to give up—but top-down comprehensibility is not the ultimate societal good. It’s also not possible to the degree that 20th-century high modernists imagined. We need compromise systems that begin “from a premise of incomplete knowledge,” and that treat that uncertainty as something beyond a problem to be solved. Buy the Book Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed James C. Scott Buy Book Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed James C. Scott Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget I first heard of Seeing Like a State from Max Gladstone, who I’m pretty sure is the Patient Zero for its spread among modern SFF authors. Like 1491, it immediately reshaped my brain, giving me new tools for thinking about worldbuilding, local activism, and scientific research. As a cognitive psychologist, I was trained to design controlled lab studies with quantifiable outcomes, and make generalizable inferences about human behavior from them. Sometimes this works, but sometimes the lab turns out to be a poor substitute for the complexities of everyday interaction. This particularly becomes an issue when we’re trying to solve a real-world problem. Suddenly I found myself asking what we were simplifying out while trying to make thoughts and relationships legible—a frustrating but provoking question for me, and probably for my colleagues too. “How do we measure this?” is a hard enough question, even before you add in “Why do we measure this?” and “What aren’t we measuring?” It’s also an incredibly productive question for worldbuilding. What is this society trying to see? What do people want or need to do that’s in conflict with legibility efforts? Who gets to do the measurement and interpretation? When we make space for illegible activities, how do we handle the tradeoffs? The whole concept of legibility, ironically, falls into the “can’t unsee it” category, and makes many confusing problems make so much more sense. Most of the non-fiction books I’ve read since encountering Scott—and a good few of the novels—contain marginal notes on the topic. Data harvesting, privacy, labor rights, assholes freaking out about diversity… there are connections to everything. If you’re trying to decide whether a proposed new law is a good idea, legibility is a good place to start—what knowledge does it assume, what simplifications will be required, and what kinds of data will need to be collected by whom to make it work…all are important questions that often get glossed. Online age verification, for example, becomes more problematic when you realize that it only works by submitting your kids’ personal information to social media companies. But I also think that Scott understates the value of legibility, and the tradeoffs that we face when we dismiss that value. The overreaches of high modernism explain the overreaches of the more recent backlashes. If you think all regulation eventually leads to five-year plans with standardized Soviet collectives, then vaccine mandates must be a tool of tyranny. Limiting arsenic in drinking water puts you on the slippery slope to state-forced famine. There’s a point toward the end of the book where Scott celebrates the value of local, adaptive knowledge with Thomas Jefferson’s ideal “yeoman farmer.” My margins overflow with the extremity of my side-eye. Centralized tyrants are bad—but local ones are no better. The yeoman “farmer,” utterly dependent on slavery, is far worse than Le Corbusier. But Scott, like so many, gives more attention to state-level authoritarian failures than to all the other levels and types of institution that can demand conformity and destroy freedom. Scott’s concepts, though, apply just as well to these institutions. On this read, I suddenly realized that the “thin simplification” of metis expertise explains why AI companies try so hard to replace the most variable, rewarding types of human effort. AI art is more predictable than human artists in much the same way that a monocropped tree plantation is more predictable than a healthy forest. It would be very convenient to a lot of people, especially those who judge art by audience size, if our work could be easily directed and systematized. Legibility strikes again! I suspect that the best alternatives are found, not in Jefferson’s slaveholders, but in Kimmerer’s very human appreciation of the systems we work with, not as problems to be solved but as partners to collaborate with. She manages to combine modern botanical studies with asking permission for the harvest; it’s a model for seeing more without seeking impossible, destructive levels of quantified control. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories Seeing Like a Surveillance State. Surveillance is a core part of most dystopias, and even of some sorta-positive futures. There’s a long inheritance from 1984, but I increasingly see stories imagining “transparent” societies where privacy is traded off for safety and social services. In real life, Orwell’s deliberately salient watchers are mirrored by institutions like China’s social credit system. In other places, we face instead pervasive corporate data collection, masked as convenience and the promise of more interesting ads. All of this opens questions for stories: what new kinds of surveillance might be developed in the future, by whom, and for what purpose? What types of control will they try to exert, with what tradeoffs? And is it possible to get luxury space communism without luxury space panopticons? New Kinds of Science. The history of the modern world—as Ada Palmer points out—is a history of changing methods for gathering and understanding knowledge. And yet, science fiction about new kinds of science is surprisingly rare. Current research wrestles with the dichotomy between quantitative data—legible, standardizable, analyzable via statistics and algorithms—and qualitative data. Qualitative studies capture nuance and local complexity—but then what? Perhaps in the future we’ll develop more systematic methods for handling qualitative information, or perhaps we’ll learn how to glean more and better applications without systematizing everything. Either way, there’s drama to be found amid both the development of those methods, and the researchers trying to navigate them. Invisible Revolutions. The flip side of surveillance is the resistance to that surveillance, and to the control that it enables. As attempts at legibility become more sophisticated, how do we find—or make—cracks to hide in? More subtly, how do we preserve and exercise metis in a world trying to automate it away? The artists’ collectives, guerrilla gardens, and makerspaces of the present will have descendants in every century. These cracks aren’t only the seeds of revolution during dystopia, but of questioning and change in better times. New Growth: What Else to Read Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence is fundamentally an exploration of the tension between pre-modern and high modern societal structures, with the tradeoffs and legibility problems made plain in the form of old gods demanding sacrifice versus necromantic lawyers demanding… mostly different forms of sacrifice. Other books exploring the tension between legibility and privacy/flexibility include Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Unraveling. Cory Doctorow’s entire oeuvre plays with near-future hackers finding ways around surveillance and control. The recent We Will Rise Again anthology (edited by Annalee Newitz, Karen Lord, and Malka Older) is full of excellent answers to the questions raised above under the Invisible Revolutions seed—if you’ve been wanting more stories with hackers and gardeners and new ideas for resistance, you want to read this one. Most of golden age science fiction reflects the optimistic assumptions of high modernism, but Foundation is particularly illustrative. I don’t actually recommend the book for people who enjoy things like character development; I do recommend the TV adaptation for a modern take. On the non-fiction side, Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine looks at how institutions handle complex problems, and asks both how they can do a better job while hitting fewer of Scott’s failure modes, and why said handling is so often designed to avoid blame rather than find real solutions. Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology comes at legibility from a different direction, contrasting tools designed for legibility and standardization with those designed for artisan expertise. And I’ve just started reading C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Nguyen asks why the effect of scoring in games is so different from the effect of quantified metrics in the larger society, and whether and how metrics can ever be made more functional than destructive. It all comes around again to the tradeoffs of legibility, and my margins are once again full of connections to Scott’s work. What are your favorite stories about surveillance, privacy, quantification, and resistance? Share in the comments![end-mark] The post The Omnipotent Eye Versus the Neighborhood: James C. Scott’s <i>Seeing Like a State</i> appeared first on Reactor.